Enjoy being fat or unfat, everyone!

2. Here is what you learn very early, as a young woman prone to fatness, even before puberty: My body is bad. My body is disgusting. My body is something for me to fight against. My body will not cooperate with my desire to be thin. My body is a disappointment to the people around me. I hate how all these studies and articles just assume as true that it is the natural order of things that fat girls will feel bad about themselves, as if this is, in fact, the proper way to view yourself when you are fat. No, this is not natural. This does not come from looking in the mirror. Girls are inculcated with messages that fatness is bad and that their bodies are their enemies. Loving your body is not option. That fatness-shame, combined with the puberty-shame of our puritanical, anti-woman, anti-sex culture, means that at the onset of puberty fat girls undergo deep, deep dissociation with their bodies. This happens to all kinds of girls, but especially fat girls.

There’s a lot more: go read! Especially teenagers and the teenager-adjacent. And let me know what you think.

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4 Responses to A Link Worth Following

Very good read. This topic is a hot button with me so please forgive me in advance for the emotional rambling I’m about to unleash.

As a mother to a now pubescent girl I feel the weight of her world on my shoulders. I’m constantly watching out, waiting for it to hit. Thankfully, she has been very resistant to the pressures from her girl friends who started obsessing a few years ago about their weight and their food. Now, after her menstrual cycle has begun and her body is rapidly changing, though, I fear that her little bubble is about to pop. It scares me. I worry about her self-esteem more than anything else and I know it’s partially because I still haven’t gotten over how it felt to be the fat kid with a diet-crazed mother. The 13 year old girl inside of me wants to slap my mother every time I’m near her and especially when she comments on the bodies of my daughters. Mothers have to stop doing this shit to their children. Their home and family is supposed to be the safe place away from this world, not the source of more distress.

And yea, let’s stop slut shaming these girls whose bodies are changing in ways they don’t understand and often don’t even want. Let’s stop making these girls feel guilty for having desires and urges and for getting attention from males that they may not even be asking for. Let’s just knock that shit right off.

I love the obligatory “encourage your daughters to eat right” quotes that seem to be in everything related to self-esteem and obesity. Yeah, I’m sure that for the vast majority of fat people with low self-esteem the problem was that they were never encouraged to “eat right.”

A major issue that I had with this (that also came up in the comments on the linked site) was the comparisons between non-fat and fat girls UNDER THE AGE OF 13 who had sex. Unless this is a 12 or 13 year old girl having sex with a boy of similar age, I’m pretty sure that’s called statutory rape. This sounds like quite a broad definition of sex.
Also unclear in the link is whether the girls studied were fat at the time of the study, after having had sex, or fat at the time they had sex. Weight gain and obesity are a potential outcome from psychological problems (depression, anxiety, eating disorders) that are somewhat more likely to occur in people who have been abused. I’m definitely not suggesting that all fat people were abused, but maybe some of these much younger obese girls are fatter now because of the effects of the trauma.

And the bit about fat teenage girls being less likely to use birth control or protection. So many of us have been told that we won’t find a boyfriend if we’re fat, we won’t or even can’t have sex if we’re fat, and doctors avoid treating us or addressing our concerns if we’re fat because the only thing they have to tell us is to lose weight first. Maybe these girls aren’t getting the same education about or access to birth control/protection.

M., the point about differential access to birth control is significant. I remember at least one story on “First Do No Harm” about a fat woman being told by a doctor that he wouldn’t prescribe birth control for her unless she lost weight. It’s very possible that a fat teen seeing a doctor for birth control might face the same attitude, or worse, a lack of belief that she’d need it, because we all know that nobody wants to have sex with a fat girl, uh huh.

I dunno, I think the “people are fat cause they’re miserable” thing has become a trope, if not a full on bingo. I am wondering if this started as something of an urban myth, because one of the side-effects of many psychoanalytical drugs is weight gain. So someone takes a anti-depressant, they gain weight = they gained weight because they were depressed?

I just hear this so much in the media now, I think people might start thinking all fat people are suffering from un-dealt with issues, and that’s why they’re fat and can’t lose the weight.

It seems the media, particularly because they earn so much money from diet advertising, keeps giving people new ideas on what is wrong with fat people. So now, it’s not just possibly being called names, it’s also being talked to in a soft way someone talks to an upset child about what is upsetting you, or being looked upon as some sort of emotionally fragile being.

Is it so much to ask that fat people simply go about their lives, without having to contend with being expected to fufill the fantasies ignorant or fat hating people like to have about us. Because if you do something, like eat a salad, or exercise, everyone feels it’s their right to gawk at you in complete stunned fascination that fat people live lives just like they do. I wonder sometimes, that their heads don’t explode like the guy from the film Scanner’s head did at the notion.

Also, how about Jillian’s Losing It? Seems once she got off Dr. Phil and empathizing with the fat acceptance side of the arguement, the minute someone held money in front of her face she thought, “Oh screw all of that! Let’s show some fat people drinking chocolate sauce!”